Each week, the Flyer will feature adoptable dogs and cats from Memphis Animal Services. All photos are credited to Memphis Pets Alive. More pictures can be found on the Memphis Pets Alive Facebook page.
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Month: December 2016
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Passengers
Douglas Adams said it best. “Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.”
Combine that really impressive bigness with Einstein’s hard speed limit, and that means f you want to get anywhere in space, it’s going to take a long time. Storytellers who want to write stories that take place on other plants have come up with all sorts of work arounds, like hyperspace and warp drive, to let people get from one star to another in a human lifetime, but there’s little evidence such things could work in real life. Therefore, the other option is to extend the human lifespan by putting passengers into extended hibernation, so you go to sleep on Earth and wake up on the exoplanet of your choosing a century from now.
Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence in Passengers.
That’s the departure point for Passengers. The starship Avalon’a 5,000 colonists and 200 crew are barreling towards the planet Homestead II with at half the speed of light when the ship hits an unexpected swarm of space rocks. The impact causes a power surge that wakes one of the passengers, Jim Preston (Chris Pratt), from cold sleep. The problem is, the ship is only 30 years into its 120 year journey, meaning Jim is going to die of old age long before the ship makes it to Homestead. He is destined to spend the rest of his life alone.
The good news is, he’s alone in a kilometer-long luxury hotel staffed by robots. Soon, he befriends Arthur (Michael Sheen), the bartender droid whose establishment bears a striking resemblance to the bar of the Overlook Hotel where Jack Nicholson went insane in The Shining. This is probably not a coincidence.
Passengers is a story in the tradition of “The Cold Equations”, a pulp sci fi story adapted into a Twilight Zone script that highlighted ethical problems posed by the limitations of long distance spaceflight. It’s rare for being good sci fi that doesn’t involve zapping things with ray guns. It’s a story about how technology sometimes puts people in impossible situations that no human has ever been faced with before. (Before now, no generation has had to ever learn Instagram etiquette.) Jim is on his own in deep space, and it seems to be impossible for him to get back into hibernation without the help of a whole lot of specialized equipment and a team of doctors. Should he wake someone up to get help? Or maybe just for company? Faced with a totally unique moral dilemma, he does the only logical thing and starts drinking heavily.
Eventually, he makes the worst possible decision and wakes up a fellow passenger named Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence), not because she can help out with the situation, but because he thinks she’s cute. Pratt’s lonely agonizing over the decision to basically commit slow murder by waking Aurora up 89 years early is the best part of Passengers.
Writer John Spaihts wrings as much drama and pathos as he can out of the impossible situation, carefully throwing new wrinkles into our heroes paths at regular intervals. The script for Passengers floated around Hollywood for years, and was at one point going to be produced with Keanu Reeves for $30 million instead of the $100 million that Sony spent on this production. Frankly, that might have been a better move. The production design on Passengers is top notch, but it doesn’t really add much to the interesting part of the story, even after the ship starts to break down and Jim and Aurora have to try to fix it with the help of a reanimated crewman named Gus (Lawrence Fishbourne). In the third act, the film’s courage suddenly fails as it tries to fit its unconventional story into a happy (or at least, happy-ish) ending. But hey, at least they were trying! If the preview audience I saw the film with was any indication, it still works, and will very likely provoke some extended conversations on the way home.
Larry Kuzniewski
Marc Gasol was good, but the Grizzlies need him to be great.
The Grizzlies got back a Mike Conley who was playing the best basketball of his career when he went down two weeks ago, and even though they went 7-2 while Conley was out and beat the Golden State Warriors by 20, now the offense is extremely limited and nobody looks comfortable playing with each other. What’s going on with the Grizzlies, and what can they do about it?
★ The offense has to be more than Gasol and Conley. It’s a Herculean feat for Conley to be back on the floor right now, but he still doesn’t look like himself. His timing is off, he’s not as aggressive (a broken back will do that to you, I suppose), he hasn’t been as smart with his shot selection…. bottom line is, Conley hasn’t been right.
The Grizzlies found a way to score without Conley. The ball moved around, Gasol went back to being the primary distributor, and guys knew they had to move if they were going to get a good shot. With Conley back, the offense has returned to its unsure pre-injury status, which is mostly a two-man game where everyone else stands around and waits to be passed the ball. Gasol was so transcendent with Conley out that it’s been depressing to see him shrink with Conley back, just as people were starting to talk about how well he’s playing.
Everything for the Grizzlies may still start on the defensive end, but in all three games since Conley has returned, the offense hasn’t even been good enough to stay afloat. Last night was certainly better than the Kings and Jazz games, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement in terms of finding a balance between Conley and Gasol on offense, and enabling other guys rather than relying on the Gasol/Conley pick and roll to create every opportunity. With Conley off the floor last night, the ball moved better. That’s a problem.
Larry Kuzniewski
‘Focus, you know, the German band that did ‘Hocus Pocus”
★ The defense has to remain focused. In his postgame presser, David Fizdale gave a specific example of what was going on with the Grizzlies’ defensive mindset during the second half. At one point, the Celtics ran the same play three times in a row and scored each time because the Grizzlies were supposed to switch and didn’t. Fizdale said he called a timeout after the second time, talked about what to do on that specific play, and then Boston ran it again immediately and the Griz still didn’t switch.
That, to me, is not a sign of a team that is paying attention to details on the defensive end. After the first half, in which the Celtics shot 29.3% and only scored 31 points, it was easy to assume that the correction was coming, and that Boston wouldn’t be held to 62 points for the whole game. The problem is that it seemed like the Grizzlies also made that assumption and didn’t sweat the small stuff; in the process, the Celtics scored as many points in the third quarter as they did in the entire first half, and scored even more in the fourth quarter (35 points) as the Grizzlies tried to hang on and force overtime instead of losing in regulation.
That’s not to say Isaiah Thomas didn’t have anything to do with it. Thomas ended up scoring 44 points on only 16 field goal attempts, including 7/10 from beyond the arc, and 36 of those points came in the second half and overtime, when it seemed like he just couldn’t miss. His speed and shooting ability make him a nightmare to defend, and he was certainly more than the Grizzlies could handle. Even with that being the case, the Grizzlies still didn’t do their best work on the defensive end, and given the stagnation of the offense, the Griz can’t really afford to be less than perfect right now.
★ It’s time for Gasol to keep being Gasol. We’ve been saying for years that if Marc Gasol could be more aggressive on a consistent basis that he’d be an All-Star starter every year. This stretch of three games is further proof that that probably won’t ever happen. With Mike Conley out, Gasol knew he had to carry the team to victory, and did whatever it took to make it happen, whether that was a triple double, scoring 30 points, playing lockdown defense, anything. He was everywhere, crushing the will of the opponent almost single-handedly.
Since Conley came back, we’ve seen the Marc Gasol of the first two weeks of the season: not quite engaged with every play, not distributing from the elbow, deferring to Conley at every opportunity. That’s not going to win the Grizzlies any basketball games right now. Gasol has to realize that Conley isn’t right, and yet he’s continuing to play like Conley is the one playing MVP-caliber basketball. Fizdale called him out a little bit after last night’s game, saying that he was disappointed in the Grizzlies’ leadership and that “our huddles are like tombs right now.” Fizdale made Gasol the only captain, and has clearly been making an effort to cultivate the kind of leadership he’s shown in spurts through his whole career. But Gasol can be a moody guy. He’s the best player on the team, and he’s just as obsessed with process as Fizdale is, but who knows how he’ll respond to being told that he needs to get better. I’d like to think he’ll do what he needs to do to make the team win right now, but we’ve also seen his mental state descend into chaos as it did in 2015 after the Jeff Green trade, ripping his jersey, fouling out and sitting down on the court, etc. I appreciate what Fizdale is doing, and he has a massive amount of pull in the locker room because he says exactly what he thinks and tells his players exactly what he expects from them. We’ll just have to wait and see if he can shake Gasol out of this mini-slump or if the chemistry of the team is becoming a longer-term project as they regain most of the guys they lost to injury.
Mike Norvell’s first season as coach of the Memphis Tigers ended Tuesday night in South Florida. Facing one of college football’s top-scoring teams, the U of M was unable to answer with enough offense of its own. Western Kentucky tailback Anthony Wales carried the ball 35 times for 253 yards and three touchdowns (while also catching four passes for 84 yards) and Hilltopper quarterback Mike White passed for 336 yards and three scores to lead the Conference USA champs. Western Kentucky accumulated 598 yards of total offense, the seventh time this season Memphis has allowed more than 500 yards in a game.
In scoring 31 points, Memphis finished with a season total of 505, only the second time (after last season’s 522) the Tigers have topped 500 points in a campaign. Wide receiver Anthony Miller played a starring role (again) with 11 catches for 151 yards and three touchdowns, giving him season totals of 95 receptions, 1,434 yards, and 14 touchdowns, all single-season marks for the Memphis program. Tiger quarterback Riley Ferguson threw for 372 yards and four touchdowns, establishing a new Tiger record for touchdowns in a season with 32. But he also threw an interception, lost a fumble, and missed a second-half series after injuring his left ankle. (He returned after the injury and threw a 45-yard scoring strike to Miller.)
Memphis took an early 7-0 lead on a screen pass Tony Pollard took 45 yards down the right sideline. But the Hilltoppers scored touchdowns on their next four possessions to take a 28-17 lead into the halftime break. The Tigers’ all-conference kicker, Jake Elliott, hit the left upright on a 43-yard field-goal attempt early in the second quarter, costing Memphis precious points in a game dominated by the two offenses.
White connected with Taywan Taylor for a 41-yard touchdown early in the third quarter to extend WKU’s lead to 35-17. Taylor finished the game with nine grabs for 144 yards.
The Memphis offense turned the ball over on downs on its first possession of the second half then lost a fumble on its second, leading to a three-yard touchdown run by Wales that put the game out of reach (41-17) midway through the third quarter.
Western Kentucky thoroughly dominated the ground game, rushing for 262 yards to the Tigers’ 73.
The loss drops Memphis to 8-5 for the season while Western Kentucky finishes with eight straight wins and an 11-3 record.
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The Ataris at the New Daisy
The Ataris play the New Daisy tongiht.
Tonight the New Daisy gets a blast from pop punk’s past as The Ataris will take the downtown stage with locals Shamefinger and Indeed, We Digress.
The Ataris at the New Daisy (2)
The Ataris formed in Indiana in 1995 and achieved their highest level of sucess with their 2003 album So Long, Astoria. The album featured a cover of Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer” and was certified gold.
The Ataris at the New Daisy (3)
And while a “Black Flag sticker on a cadillac” seems highly unlikey, the song got tons of radio play, and is their most known song. Tonight’s show will run you between $14 and $17, but advanced tickets are available here.
The Ataris at the New Daisy
Gentry
The woman convicted of squatting on a $2.4 million East Memphis home in 2013 will get a new sentencing hearing after she won an appeal last week from a state court.
Tabitha Gentry was sentenced last year to serve 20 years in prison after a jury convicted her of theft of property valued at over $250,000 and aggravated burglary.
Gentry and others were found squatting in the vacant East Memphis mansion. She had chained the gates of the mansion property and hung signs, which read “ Moorish National Republic,” and “I, Abka ReBay, seize this land.” Gentry told officers “Abka ReBay” was an alias.
In 2013, other “Moorish Nationals” were laying claim to vacant property because, they said, their ancestors were here first. A similar case arose that year with a Moorish National squatting on and claiming a posh, 12-bedroom home in Bethesda, Ma.
After Gentry was convicted, she was sentenced to 20 years for her crimes in the squatting case. She was already serving a 14-year prison sentence for other crimes.
The trial court last year decided Gentry should serve those two sentences consecutively, meaning that she would begin serving her 20-year sentence after her 14-year sentence was complete for a total of 34 years. But a decision this week from the Court of Criminal Appeals, will allow Gentry to get a new sentencing hearing and, possibly, a shorter prison stay.
Consecutive charges are mandatory for felons in Tennessee. However, the appeals court said Gentry was not a felon at the time and ordered a new sentencing hearing for her. The new hearing could allow Gentry to serve the sentences concurrently, meaning she could serve a total of 20 years.
Gentry is currently held at the West Tennessee State Penitentiary.
Categories
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
“It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet.”
Those are the opening words of the famous opening crawl from the original 1977 Star Wars. The entire plot of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is contained in those three sentences. A lot has changed in the almost four decades (!) since George Lucas’ space opera debuted, transforming filmmaking in its own image. In the early days, part of the mystique of Star Wars was the feeling that the galaxy was a huge, real, and lived-in place. The spaceships were not gleaming, shiny, and white, but grungy, dirty, and falling apart. The crawl, and subsequent hints in the dialog, hinted at an extensive and complex backstory. When Lucas revisited his universe, beginning in 1999, he focused on the big questions: How did the Old Republic become the Galactic Empire? How did Jedi Knight Obi Wan Kenobi’s apprentice Aanakin Skywalker become Darth Vader? True, there was much fertile ground for imagination there, but the results speak for themselves. The prequels consistently looked amazing, but the stories, written by Lucas himself, were bloated, confusing messes.
Felicity Jones as Jyn in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
Lucas originally wanted to create a playground universe for other directors to work in. With the prequels, he abandoned that vision and tried to do it all himself. Now that Lucas is retired, and Lucasfilm sold to Disney, Executive Producer Kathleen Kennedy is trying to follow Lucas’ original vision. Last year, The Force Awakens continued the story of Luke, Leia, and Han with Lucas/Spielberg acolyte J.J. Abrams at the helm, proving that there was plenty of life left in the old formula.
Of course, the ultimate reason why Disney bought Lucasfilm for $4 billion is to replicate the success of the Marvel franchise, which pumps out a couple of loosely connected movies a year based on the enormous stable of comic book superheroes Stan Lee and company built up over the years. In Star Wars, Disney saw another ATM to make annual withdrawals from moviegoers pockets, and that means the once-every-three-years schedule Lucas operated on had to be accelerated. If The Force Awakens was the Star Wars equivalent of The Avengers, then Rogue One is Doctor Strange—except it’s much better than Doctor Strange.
In all of the almost seven hours of the prequels, Lucas never touched on the epic story he (with the help of Brian De Palma) wrote into the 1977 opening crawl. John Knoll, who worked as the special effects supervisor for the prequels, pointed that out a decade ago, but Lucas, stung by the lukewarm reception to his prequel trilogy, didn’t want to listen. Fortunately, Kennedy did. Rogue One is a prequel done right, and it succeeds by focusing on the details. For the first time, there is no opening crawl text, because it’s not an installment of the Skywalker family saga, it’s about little people getting caught up in the sweep of war.
Diego Luna as Cassian Andor
And “war” is the operative word. The Star Wars formula can be boiled down to three elements: Kurosawa samurai film, Flash Gordon, and World War II movies. All three elements are present, but Rogue One shifts the balance toward the third—call it Saving Private Leia. Instead of an opening crawl, director Gareth Edwards kicks off with a flashback. Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen), is a scientist who has fled the grip of the Emperor, hiding on a backwater planet with his daughter Jyn (Felicity Jones). But Orsen Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), director of weapons research for the Imperial Navy, is not one to take no for an answer. He and his squad of black-clad Death Troopers kidnap Galen, but Jyn manages to get away with the help of Saw Gerra (Forrest Whittaker), a revolutionary waging a one-man war against the Empire separate from the Alliance to Restore The Republic.
The flashback is revealed to be the dream of Jyn while she’s stewing in an Imperial prison years later. The Rebel Alliance has gotten word that Imperial defector Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed) has a message from Galen warning of a planet killing ultimate weapon. Bodhi is in the custody of Saw’s rogue cell, so Rebel intelligence officer Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) is dispatched to spring Jyn from Imperial custody, make contact with Saw and get to the bottom of the situation. Along the way, Jyn and Andor collect a Seven Samurai-style ragtag team of misfits and hard cases for the desperate raid to steal the Death Star blueprints that Luke Skywalker will use to save the galaxy.
At times, Rogue One doesn’t feel like a Star Wars movie. For one thing, the films have always soft-pedaled the violence. In The Phantom Menace, war atrocities are alluded to but never seen. In A New Hope, the planetary genocide of Alderaan is seen from orbit, its doomed inhabitants are abstract. Rogue One foregrounds Imperial brutality, and the dire measures the rebels have to take to combat them. The pacing is different, too. J. J. Abrams has spent much of his career trying to recreate the rhythms editor Marcia Lucas developed in 1977. The first hour of Rogue One is paced more like Edwards’ 2010’s shoestring indie Monsters. But if it stayed at that pace, it would have ended up like his turgid 2014 Godzilla reboot. Instead, it carefully accelerates into one of the most thrilling climaxes in recent memory. The blowout third act is a staple of Marvel movies; they have become almost interchangeable blurs of brightly costumed heroes beating up on dull villains. Rogue One’s climax features not only thrilling heroics on the ground, but also the best space battle since Return Of The Jedi. The visuals are unlike anything Star Wars has ever attempted before, and they represent the pinnacle of the photorealistic style Industrial Light & Magic has been pursuing since 1977.
But none of that would matter without characters you can love and root for. Diego Luna’s performance makes Captain Andor one of the best characters in the Star Wars canon. Jones’ performance put me in mind of Furiosa from Mad Max: Fury Road. Other standouts are Donnie Yen as a Jedi Temple guardian inspired by Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman, Alan Tudyk as the wisecracking droid K-2SO, and Whitaker as the bitter warrior Saw. Among the film’s many outstanding technical achievements is the uncanny digital reconstruction of Grand Moff Tarkin, even though the original actor Peter Cushing passed away in 1994. There are more digitally reconstructed cameos, but I won’t spoil them here.
Rogue One has the same dark tone as The Empire Strikes Back, which should be expected from a story that takes place in what Obi Wan Kenobi called The Dark Times. Its swashbuckling is more desperate, and its plot twists more unpredictable, even as it moves towards the inevitable conclusion. It may not be a traditional Star Wars movie, but it is the Star Wars movie we need as we stare into our own version of the Dark Times—a story of courage in the face of seemingly overwhelming evil.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
This week on the show, Kevin and Phil talk about:
- Mike Conley is back, but should he be?
- Are NBA teams going overboard resting players? Did Memphis get screwed by LeBron James’ rest?
- Should the NBA shorten the schedule to eliminate back-to-backs? (Yes.)
- Phil thinks the NBA should institute a disabled list or injured reserve, and he’s right.
- The Grizzlies are playing the Celtics Tuesday and the Pistons Wednesday.
- Will Gasol go back to playing deferentially now that so many guys are returning from injury?
- Mike D’Antoni, James Harden, and the Houston Rockets are coming to town on Friday for the first time.
- What Christmas gifts would Kevin and Phil give the Grizzlies?
The Beyond the Arc podcast is available on iTunes, so you can subscribe there! It’d be great if you could rate and review the show while you’re there. You can also find and listen to the show on Stitcher and on PlayerFM.
You can call our Google Voice number and leave us a voicemail, and we might talk about your question on the next show: 234-738-3394
You can download the show here or listen below:
After hearing reports that detainees of the Shelby County Juvenile Court detention center had inadequate clothing to guard against frigid temperatures outside and inside, criminal justice reform advocacy group Just City dropped off 80 sweatshirts for the facility’s 80 or so residents.
Just City’s founder, Josh Spickler, said he learned through attorneys that the underage detainees often spoke to their legal representatives through chattering teeth, while wearing only short-sleeved teeshirts.
Spickler decided his organization would donate as many sweatshirts as they could. Bluff City Sports pitched in and donated additional garments to fill the gap.
“I don’t have any information that would suggest that the building’s HVAC controls aren’t working,” said Spickler, “but regardless, I think we all know that large buildings are difficult to heat and cool on a consistent level. These kids should have more than a short-sleeved shirt.”
Temperatures in Memphis dropped drastically in the early hours of Sunday, and have remained below freezing for the duration of today’s daylight hours.
Just a few months ago, temperature control at the detention center was under scrutiny as media learned the detention center was without air-conditioning during the sweltering heat of late August and early September.
“Keeping them comfortable and providing basics like consistent temperatures should not be too much to expect,” Spickler added.
Chief Kirk Fields of the juvenile detention center, who was on hand to receive the clothing donations, maintained that the building was adequately heated for its occupants.
Responding to the assertion that attorneys for the minors reported inadequate clothing paired with subpar heating, Fields said that he was not aware of such reports.
“I’m appreciative of Josh for the donation,” said Fields. “Around this time of year, we receive donations from a lot of nonprofit agencies, just bringing Christmas cheer to the kids. So, I’ll take this as another one of those holiday donations.”
Categories
Music Video Monday: Lisa Mac
Music Video Monday wants to you dance it off.
Lisa Mac’s new single “Mr. Mystery” is a groovy love letter to a man who won’t make up his mind, produced by Eliot Ives (guitarist in Justine Timberlake’s band The Tennessee Kids) and Scott Hardin.
Director Melissa Anderson Sweazy says she wanted the video to “feel like that part in almost every dance movie when everything is falling apart for the hero/heroine: they are clashing with the head of the dance company, the love interest has blown them off, and they’ve just got to dance it out.”
Cinematographer Ryan Earl Parker shot dancers Natalie Fotopolous Reding and Alberto Gaspar in the Jack Robinson Gallery. “The chorus is so swoon-inducing that it just sweeps you up and makes you want to move. I wanted Natalie to be the stand in for all of us who wish they could truly dance like no one’s watching and look amazing while doing so.”
Music Video Monday: Lisa Mac
If you would like to see your music video on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.